Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

seattletimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 385 posts

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#101

Post by renewiltord »

plank_time wrote: post #55

When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…

That seems pretty well-optimized, right? The employees value the money more than they value well-being, and the company values the money more than it values their well-being. That is pretty good alignment.

Also, why wouldn't you just work elsewhere and buy AMZN stock if that's all you want. Work at GOOG, sell your stock, buy AMZN stock.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#102

Post by aranchelk »

I recently reread The New Economics. Deming talks about a factory worker screwing up on the production line, ruining a large quantity of product, and getting punished for it. He makes the argument that the design of the line, company policy, etc, have a far greater impact on workers’ productivity than the intrinsic qualities of those workers.

I told this to a colleague and she said “well yeah, I can see how that would be true in a factory but it doesn’t apply to software”. I pointed out that I haven’t dereferenced a null pointer in years, and haven’t been the cause of a buffer overrun ever, and that's all because of tooling, not because I’m such a badass engineer.

Having been convinced by Deming’s arguments, I can’t think of rank-and-yank as anything other than a deeply flawed, costly, and counterproductive optimization strategy, all based on a false assumption.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#103

Post by [deleted] »

renewiltord wrote: post #101
plank_time wrote: post #55

When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…

That seems pretty well-optimized, right? The employees value the money more than they value well-being, and the company values the money more than it values their well-being. That is pretty good alignment. Also, why wouldn't you just work elsewhere and buy AMZN stock if that's all you want. Work at GOOG, sell your stock, buy AMZN stock.

[deleted]

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#104

Post by rkalla »

renewiltord wrote: post #101
plank_time wrote: post #55

When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…

That seems pretty well-optimized, right? The employees value the money more than they value well-being, and the company values the money more than it values their well-being. That is pretty good alignment. Also, why wouldn't you just work elsewhere and buy AMZN stock if that's all you want. Work at GOOG, sell your stock, buy AMZN stock.

Fair point - but you aren't getting it at a 15-30% discount (ESPP) or 'for free' via RSUs - so paying market rate isn't as enticing.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#105

Post by GVIrish »

xibalba wrote: post #12
ladyattis wrote: post #10

I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of consta…

A fact that counters your hypothesis: Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to have ever existed. *Edited: Turns out I have been misusing the word "counterfactual" for quite some time.

Amazon can be one of the most productive companies ever, and still be doing self-sabotaging things that will erode their long term success.

Truth is that any given time no company is perfect, they can simultaneously being doing things that give them an advantage in the market and doing things that undermine their own efforts. As long as the advantageous stuff outweighs the self-sabotage, they can be successful.

Some of the trouble is that people see success and assume that 100% of the things they are doing are the correct thing to do. Not considering that maybe the reason they can get away with one sort of bad behavior is because they have such a huge advantage in some other area.

So for Amazon, the soaring stock price serves as a big financial incentive that allows some employees to overlook the work environment. But that may not always be the case, and the more people share negative experiences about the work environment, the more new people avoid joining altogether. The negative reputation and the turnover may not be enough to doom the company, but on the flip side they'd probably be even more successful in the short and long term if they didn't have a firing quota.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#106

Post by asdfman123 »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #60
decafninja wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having Amazon on your resume probably opens many doors. True, there are other companies on par or better than Amazon on many different metrics. Many of them are at least as hard to get into as Amazon though. If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on…

If you can pass Amazon's interview you can pass any other fang's interview which will give you the same CV prestige with probably less hassle. The only people I know who went to Amazon picked it just because it was the only fang they passed at and they didn't want to bother doing another round of interviews or wait for the cooldown period. Sure, other fangs have similar internal politics nightmares - but Amazon seems…

I failed Amazon like three times in a row (along with other smaller companies). This last year I expanded my search and got into Facebook and Google, despite failing Amazon again.

Plus there are lots of smaller companies that are as prestigious within the valley as Amazon. I mean, if you had to hire someone, would you really consider ex-Amazon superior to Uber, Snapchat, Microsoft, some random startup, etc.?

If I were hiring someone I might actually discriminate against Amazon because I'd be afraid of absorbing some of their culture.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#107

Post by thebean11 »

renewiltord wrote: post #101
plank_time wrote: post #55

When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…

That seems pretty well-optimized, right? The employees value the money more than they value well-being, and the company values the money more than it values their well-being. That is pretty good alignment. Also, why wouldn't you just work elsewhere and buy AMZN stock if that's all you want. Work at GOOG, sell your stock, buy AMZN stock.

Because the stock comes in a 4 year grant. You can't trade your GOOG for AMZN until vesting.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#108

Post by nxmnxm99 »

plank_time wrote: post #55

When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…

I have several friends at Amazon. They all love it. Mostly because they're workaholics. Most Amazon people you talk to will say the same things.

However, you won't see that story featured on Hacker News because it doesn't fit the "bring down the bourgeoisie" overwork-porn yay-Sweden narrative that is HN/Reddit.

My theory is it's because most high performers who work hard don't have much time for Reddit/HN and it self-selects for the opposite profile

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#109

Post by asdfman123 »

xibalba wrote: post #20
retrocryptid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what measure of productivity?

Almost any mainstream business metric. Here is a brief and incomplete sample: Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, return on invested capital, end price reduction for customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs available for sale, new products/services launched, etc etc.

And Amazon is very successful because it has dominated one of the main reasons we use the internet: online shopping.

Comparing online shopping revenue to social media revenue kind of feels like comparing apples to oranges to me.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#110

Post by _rs »

rkalla wrote: post #104
renewiltord wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems pretty well-optimized, right? The employees value the money more than they value well-being, and the company values the money more than it values their well-being. That is pretty good alignment. Also, why wouldn't you just work elsewhere and buy AMZN stock if that's all you want. Work at GOOG, sell your stock, buy AMZN stock.

Fair point - but you aren't getting it at a 15-30% discount (ESPP) or 'for free' via RSUs - so paying market rate isn't as enticing.

Does Amazon have an ESPP? I don't think they do. They also aren't really giving it "for free", they're giving it instead of additional salary, and when it vests you can choose to sell it all immediately to make up the salary difference.
Post reply on HN